


and softly came the sunlight

by bogbats



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Forgotten Realms
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Exhibitionism, F/F, Infidelity, Knights in love with their sovereigns, Masturbation, Pining, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 05:09:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15901515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogbats/pseuds/bogbats
Summary: When Justinia were a younger woman, a paladin newly devoted to her oath of the crown, she found a love for her sovereign that would shape her for decades to come.





	and softly came the sunlight

“Ser Justinia.” As one might catch a companion by the elbow before they can depart the room, Thérèse catches her by her name, her title.

Justinia halts and turns, the sweep of her cloak around her ankles emphasizing how quickly she does so. The remainder of the guard continue on without her, only Casimir glancing back to raise a questioning brow. “Yes, lady?”

Where she stands in the archway leading to the gardens beyond, Thérèse Dupont hesitates, then lifts her chin. “I would ask that you accompany me on my walk,” says she, “and be perfectly forthright regarding any questions I wish to ask you. I mean to discern your character, if you are to serve our family in your father’s stead.”

Thérèse is the eldest of the Dupont sisters, and closest to Justinia in age; she has stepped into the waning of her twenties with enviable grace, and her younger siblings trail close behind. Each is prim and upright, charming women in possession of a vicious intelligence and poise that Justinia admires. 

She smiles carefully and nods. “Of course, my lady.”

“Splendid,” says Thérèse. “I would like to visit the rose gardens. Come along.”

At Thérèse’s insistence, Justinia walks in equal stride with her. It sits wrongly at first, but the feeling fades quickly to the background, for the interrogation Thérèse subjects her to is far more concerning. Her time as a courtier turns to her brother, Sascha, also well-ensconced within the court; turns to her upbringing; turns to her love of the Duponts themselves. 

And then, finally, turns to gentler questions as, “Which of the gardens are you fondest of, ser?” to which Justinia tries to hide her relief and says, “All of them, if I may.”

Though no less cutthroat, a courtier’s life had not been the same weight as the plate armour she now wears with devotion and pride. At every turn and every doubt, she has had Thérèse met and satisfied, of course, else she’d have never been knighted to begin with, but she’s grateful to feel her way through something softer. Thérèse, too, seems to fall into a sweeter mood the longer they walk. 

“Help me pick a bouquet,” she says, laughing.

Justinia finds herself compelled to, and so obeys.

In the end, she picks the entire bouquet herself, because only she wears gloves that fend off the pricking, and its cloying sweet smell makes her head swim the entire way back to Thérèse’s boudoir. This, too, is at her insistence. She lingers uneasily in the entryway while Thérèse arranges the blooms in a vase upon the windowsill.

“I’ll take my leave, then,” she excuses, once the lady Dupont has seated herself at the foot of her bed and arranged herself as elegantly as the portraits that decorate the halls. She has taken on a faraway look that makes Justinia very aware of how long she has gone in the lady’s company.

“Ser,” Thérèse says, catching her again. “Stay.”

Justinia makes herself smile—all the right lines and all the right parts showing, yet troubled between the brows—and she nods again, adopting a soldier’s stance, her hand upon the pommel of her blade. 

“Of course, my lady.”

For Thérèse, there is very little that would not be _of course_. Indeed, for all of house Dupont, anything at all would have to be _of course_. That is an oath she made to herself long before she was told to don the mantle, and now with its weight ever-heavy upon her shoulder, Justinia has no intentions of breaking it. 

She places herself by the door and stands with her back to it, straight-shouldered, at attention—and Thérèse, perched upon the divan and gazing solemn and doe-like at her, says nothing more for a long time.

Finally, once Justinia’s gaze turns towards the sun-struck sea beyond the open window, and does not return, Thérèse speaks again. “Is it so much more beautiful than I?”

Justinia’s cheeks warm to be chided in this way. “No, my lady,” she says, obeying the tacit request she hears in the heiress’ tone, and looking back, assures her, “it is of no compare.” 

She expects to see a noble frown there to greet her, and indeed the look is waiting; Thérèse’s lips pouted, the colour of rose glass.

“If I were to shimmer as brightly as the sea,” she asks, “would I, too, be worthy of such a proud and wistful gaze?”

An unseen hand reaches inside Justinia’s chest and squeezes her heart in its palm. She stands taller but feels as servile as she would if she were kneeling down; Thérèse’s lofty gaze lights a heat that burns like smouldering coal. She drops her chin, speaking carefully to the floor. “I would look upon you with both if you asked it, lady Thérèse,” she says, “and I _do_ —as I have done always, and shall continue to do, for all the Dupont family.”

If she were asked to prostrate herself, Justinia knows she would. Without a second’s consideration. There are places in her heart for many things—family, duty, faith—and Justinia keeps each quite separate from the other, so she can protect what needs protecting when needs must. 

For Thérèse, she has found herself nursing a particular tenderness that doesn’t seem to fit in any of those places; rather, it floats above all of them, like the skimming of mist over the water at sunrise. And Thérèse herself has nursed it, though perhaps unwittingly.

Too many times now has Justinia bent to kiss her hand and been permitted to linger there for a touch too long. 

“I see,” says Thérèse, and, “I ask it, then,” in a tone of command not yet grown into. 

Justinia ducks her face lower. “Yes, lady.”

She waits for Thérèse’s word before raising her head again, keenly aware of her newness, which she has oft made herself ignore in the past: she is still green, a courtier recently made knight, and now dedicated to fulfilling her duty, _whatever_ that duty might be; and she is clumsy, and sometimes overzealous, and thirsty for approval in the attempt.

But Thérèse, who is barely younger than her; Thérèse, still wielding her nobility like a thing to be careful with… Thérèse looks calm. The picture of grace straightening to regard her, where she gravely stands by the door. No thought betrays in her expression, nor in her poise, as the seconds slip by and the sweat breaks on Justinia’s brow.

Then, without the passing of her judgement, Thérèse brings her hands to her own throat, where blushed lace and polished half-pearl buttons spill across her collar. She begins to unfasten them, to the clamour of sudden heat pressing at Justinia’s cheeks, and gently she parts the chiffon to reveal a band of ivory skin and the soft shadow of her bosom beneath.

Justinia’s mouth tightens minutely at the quick little pain it sparks in her chest, as though the sight of the lady’s bared flesh has provoked an invisible hand to tangle in the veins around her heart twist them until they pull into pieces. She releases a breath, eyes falling closed.

And, seeing that, Thérèse calls to her. “Ser Justinia, I have asked that you look at me.”

So Justinia catches herself and flutters a glance heavenward instead, for she is quick to obey normally, and too quick to obey now. In this way, she watches Thérèse bare herself. Within moments, the blouse falls loose and the panels are drawn aside as only should be done were it her betrothed standing before her. But it is only Justinia.

She’s… beautiful, though she could of course be nothing else; with skin now revealed that has been unkissed by lips or sun ever before, her nipples pink as Justinia’s cheeks feel. She holds herself tense, shoulders back, at stringent attention, and dares not let her gaze rest in place upon the lady Dupont for long, lest the touch she longs for it to be begin to burn her.

Thérèse, in her stead, sweeps the curve of her breasts in slender hands. Even across the room, Justinia hears the lady’s quick inhale, and the release again through half-smiling lips. It is a touch all its own, crossing the room to her feeling not so different from a caress that might brush across her brow and tuck her hair fondly behind an ear. She aches for it to be real. 

Painfully, Justinia shifts her stance to stand with knees and heels as closely together as her plate will allow. The haft of her blade she squeezes until its shape indents in her leather-clad palm, wishing to be bare-handed and knelt between Thérèse’s parted knees, but she refuses to allow herself to think it for more than a moment.

She fears being unable to remain silent, should the desire rise too near the surface.

The more difficult it becomes, regardless. A prickle of sweat rolls down Justinia’s spine, warmed both by the sunbeam and Thérèse’s gracefully-drifting hands, neither bearing any concern towards relieving her of the discomfort, and as Thérèse lays her hands in her lap and gathers her skirts, bringing the hemline up her legs, Justinia slides a foot forward, drawn by the thread that seems to exist now between Thérèse and her own heart. 

She stills herself before she can move out of place, pressing her lips thinly together. The clatter of her greaves gives her away despite the restraint. The smile that alights on her lady’s face makes her breath shiver. It shouldn’t.

Lifting her gown high so that Justinia may see, Thérèse uncrosses at the knee, allowing her a glimpse of startlingly high leg, beyond which her shape is draped in shadow and falls of lace and linen and samite. Justinia knows enough, has been granted enough, to imagine. She darts her gaze up again after barely a moment, though meeting Thérèse’s eyes almost aches the worse. They are fixed upon her, heavy-lashed, nearly enough to drown in—and they rove her with such intensity, unlike any other that Thérèse has laid upon her before. 

She wants to know, almost as badly as she wants to close the distance, whether this is truly an act committed for her. That thought alone feels too disgustingly presumptuous to so much as hope.

Whether it is or is not, she cannot make herself ask Thérèse to say. She cannot make her voice put words to anything at all.

But she stands rooted just the same, tensing at every echo of sound from further within the Dupont’s manor, troubled by the punishment she knows awaits her should anyone catch her standing witness to this. The family would remove her from the guard and from their court, and she’d henceforth be a disgrace to their house and the de Vandes both. Father and Sascha would never be able to look at her with pride or faith in her valour again. 

The idea wrenches in her so completely that Justinia scarcely can hear anything besides her own pulse; save, of course, for the footfalls that come too-close to the door at her back, but never quite make it to stand outside. Never quite interrupt.

And with her actions unimpeded by courtesy, or sense, or by Justinia herself, Thérèse finally opens her thighs and reaches between. Justinia’s fingers flex at her side. “Turn your back, Justinia, if you must,” Thérèse tells her then, in a murmur, neglecting the _ser_. “I will not condemn you for it.”

The presence of words passing between them once more somehow feels more licentious than all else she wants or has seen. More and more Justinia fights the desire to go to her knees and beg a kiss as the poor beg for food and shelter and other needful things, and truly it’s selfish to feel that a kiss could at all be comparable, and yet it _does_ , and her own breathing has gone hitched in absence of it.

“No,” Justinia says at last. Her collar is too hot and too tight, and her braid and every buckle on her armour strapping her into it feels the same. “You have asked this of me, lady Thérèse.”

Thérèse smiles. “I am also asking this of you, should that help spur your decision.”

She’s left with no recourse. She pauses, then ducks her head— _of course_ —and draws her lip between her teeth the moment she has turned away from her. The rustle of fine fabrics from across the room tells her precisely when Thérèse takes to gathering her skirts up around her waist, and as Justinia gazes resolutely at the door that neither she nor Thérèse had locked upon their entry, she hears her begin to sigh.

Wordless, nonsensical… the floaty sighs of the pleasured, to which, again, her betrothed alone should be privy. From beneath the sighs gradually builds a sound that jolts down Justinia’s spine, soft and slick, painting a moving image in her mind that squirms through her, all sound confined to this room pressing hot on the back of her neck like a living, physical thing, until she finally relents to it and closes her eyes. 

Allows it to seep down over her and stroke her through steel and arming wear. 

A part of her she resolves not to bend to wants so badly to look back, halfway convincing the rest of her that Thérèse would likely take pleasure in it, the same as she’s taken pleasure in asking that she be here, and watch, and _listen_.

Justinia listens for what feels like an age. Her cheeks warm and warm, a heat that eventually runs down her throat, making her head feel filled with cotton. She reaches a hand forward and braces it against the door’s engraved panelling, fingers splayed out straight, and finally Thérèse’s murmuring voice peaks in a sharp gasp followed by sweltering quiet.

At that, her head turns sharply to the side—not enough, nor soon enough, to take in the sight of Thérèse’s spending, but in her peripheral she still sees the lady’s shape; laid across the divan with her long limbs spread and her fingers wetly slipping from between her thighs. She jerks her chin back, hand springing to the clasp of her cloak, and though she tries, she cannot blink the image away.

If she had caught the glance, Thérèse says nothing of it, which is the graciousness Justinia has come to expect from her, though… never in such a situation as this. 

The silence settles like snow between them while she laces herself back into her dressing—Justinia hears the whisper of it—; then, at last, come the words that clench in her stomach. “Come face your sovereign, Justinia, as you face the sea.”

So, filled with a yearning that she cannot ever follow, Justinia obeys.

Now Thérèse stands as she had stood in the archway to the gardens, with her head held high and hands folded, and though the stain on her lips has been bitten away, no one would be able to tell merely by looking at her the moment that has just passed. 

For an instant, Justinia sees a warmth in the lady’s eyes; it fades, but does not disappear, as she straightens, adopting noble posture once more. Thérèse extends her hand towards her. “Ser.” 

Ah.

Obediently, Justinia strides forward and takes a trembling knee, clasping the lady’s fingers in a gloved hand. She bows her head and presses a kiss to her knuckles, and while her kisses have only ever been in respect, she smells the perfume of her sex clinging to them and feels its cooling slickness wet her lips. Her heart aches, but she remains still and bowed until the proper amount of time has passed.

“You’re excused for the evening.” Thérèse smiles down at her and traces the cut of Justinia’s jaw before withdrawing. “Tomorrow, kindly escort me to the hanging gardens.”

Tomorrow.

She rises on weak knees.

“Of course, lady,” Justinia says.


End file.
